Ditching WordPress for Eleventy
Posted by Josh Sherman on in Software Development (Wordpress)
Why do I do this to myself? I settle on a platform, get comfortable with it, and then I decide to throw it all away.
I should have known that going back to WordPress was a bad idea. I'm not even talking about the drama surrounding the platform either. I have a pretty strong track record of not only disliking WordPress, but also favoring static site generators.
I've even rolled a few of my own along the way.
Why I went back to WordPress
I got it into my head that I needed to focus on content - and stop fiddle-fucking around with my blog. WordPress seemed like a natural fit, and I just needed to get over myself and commit.
So I did - and life was good. For a while at least.
I kept my nose down, bought some plugins to do trivial work, and ultimately accomplished what I set out to do, actually get some writing done.
The cracks started showing
I was fine paying for hosting, so I wouldn't have to mess with managing yet another server. I was fine paying for plugins that barely did anything. What I wasn't okay with was the damned post editor locking up while I tried to write.
Since the whole point of moving to WordPress was to focus on my writing, this was completely unacceptable. It wasn't an all of the time thing, and it definitely seemed in relation to me crushing some long form content.
Once the tech starts to fail me, it gets hard to justify the costs.
The future I wanted, but WordPress couldn't deliver
Something else that started to bother me was the lack of good AI tools out there for WordPress. While I can admit that I probably didn't do enough research, the bits of AI functionality I had run into were horrible at best.
I use a lot of these tools, and I know how powerful, albeit imperfect, things are right now. Meanwhile, I could barely generate usable meta descriptions with the tools I had in front of me.
Moving back to flat files, gives me a lot of power to experiment. Tools like Codex and Claude Code just work. Keep in mind, I'm not talking about generating blog content with AI, I still love to write. I'm talking about doing things like finding problems (typos, borked syntax, etc) and being able to improve the quality of my site and content.
Migrating from WordPress to Eleventy
So as it turns out, I cheated and didn't migrate from WordPress to Eleventy. What I ended up doing was dusting off my pre-WordPress Jekyll site, migrating that to Eleventy, and then used some friendly robots to help port the WordPress-specific content down to markdown.
It wasn't perfect, but I was happy with the process. If nothing else, it was a good first experiment to see how things would go.
Forever a work in progress
Even though I moved to WordPress to focus on content, that hacker instinct to dork around on my personal site never faded. While I don't have any interest in building a blog from the ground up, I do still enjoy tinkering.
There will be a lot of tinkering coming up, because I cut a lot of corners to get to this point. Hence the "beta" denotion in the header ;)
This site is always a work in progress, insert construction image with some pardon our dust messaging. In fact, the nerdy little version number in the header prompt is actually the current version of this site, give or take.